Salvage the Bones
I’m definitely a cat person when we are dividing the world into cat people or dog people. So when I began Jesmyn Ward’s 2010 novel, Salvage the Bones, I was not immediately drawn in. The opening scene depicts a female pit bull named China as she gives birth. I’m being told this by Esch, the sister of Sheetah who at sixteen is the owner and adorer of China. Esch tells a vivid story of how China as a pup stole everyone’s shoes, hid them, and then eventually took them outside where she put them in “shallow ditches under the house.” The opening paragraph ends with this: “Now China is giving like she once took away, bestowing where she once stole. She is birthing puppies.” As Esch unfolds her story about Skeetah and his dog, Ward magically overcomes my inherent preference for cats and by the end of the first chapter I am wanting to read about how the puppies fare.
Knowing what I now know about Ward’s own childhood experience with a pit bull, I’m amazed that she is able to tell of the elemental love and loyalty that exists between Skeetah and China. Here’s a brief description of her terrifying encounter: “When I was six, a pit bull tried to rip out my throat. I was walking down my parents’ oystershell driveway when the dog attacked me, probably because another dog, brown and shaggy in my memory was nearby and in heat. My attacker was white, muscled, wide across the chest, and tall; brandishing his weapon of a mouth, he blocked my path and sidled close to me. He was so still, and his back bumped my waist. ‘Move,’ I told him. ‘Get.’ Instead, he growled and jumped, and I fell beneath him. His growl rose to a pulsing grind. He sliced my scalp. My ear. My back. I curled in on myself, collapsed the target, and fought him. Beat his ribs with my fists. Kicked his soft underbelly. I screamed so loudly that my aunt ran down the street with a broom and beat him off of me, and then she walked me home. I wailed, covered in blood. On the way to the hospital, my mother put my head in her lap. I don’t remember crying in the car. I was in shock.”
As this story develops, I see Skeetah take China to a well-known clearing in the woods where a group of black men fight their dogs. Ward spares no graphic details of these brutal contests but she also presents them with no judgment. I’m simply to understand that this activity is a way for men undervalued by the larger world in which they try to function to step away from white prejudice and feel like humans with agency, even if it is not they themselves exercising that self-determination. I’m struck by the fact that these fights are always called and a winner declared by common consent before any animal is killed. And, even though some of Skeetah’s family feel he is fighting China too soon after her first delivery of puppies, the dog throws herself into the fray and comes away the winner because she senses how important it is to her owner that they both can hold their heads up high as they leave the arena.
This novel won the National Book Award in 2011, bringing Ward to the attention of lots of readers. As is often the case, I came to her rather late but once her language began to work its magic on my imagination, I find myself unable to let go of the sheer energy and force of her prose. Ward is 41 years old and is emerging as one of this country’s finest black authors, often echoing both themes and styles of her giant predecessor, Toni Morrison. Both authors care fiercely about finding exactly the right word/phrase/figure of speech in which to implant her seering analysis of racism in America. Both authors work to create complex characters who act both nobly and badly, who struggle with internal demons even as they maneuver their way through the minefields thrown onto their paths by white prejudice, white fear, and a system rigged against them at most every turn. Ward was a born in DeLisle, Mississippi, a census-designated part of Gulfport-Biloxi on the Mississippi gulf. Ward continues to live in the house where she was born, saying to friends who ask why she wants to live in such a small town, “It’s home.” She may live modestly, but her awards are mounting up as she continues to publish. She has even been given a MacArthur “genius grant” in recognition of all she has already done to progress American letters into fresh corners of this country’s life as it is lived every day by black people with no glitter but lots of persistence and heart.
Perhaps the first thing that impressed me about Ward’s style is her heavy reliance on similes and metaphors to carry her ideas and to force us deeper and deeper into her created worlds. With this I started out keeping a list of particularly striking figures of speech–something I routinely do when I’m reading someone whose language delights me. By about page 50, however, I realized I was writing down almost every page as having one such trope, so I just decided all I needed to do was open the book at random, read a few sentences, and I’d find a gem. Here’s just a tiny sampling to show how Ward chooses to make abstractions tangible: “The terrible truth of what I am flares like dry fall fire in my stomach, eating all the fallen pine needles” or “he wipes away the droplets of blood that have gathered on my legs like summer gnats” or “We were a pile of wet, cold branches.” Ward’s prose stops me with these kinds of comparisons until I am emotionally exhausted but hungry to stumble upon the next one.
The human interactions among Esch and her family take place under the shadow of news from their radio about a possible hurricane. No one in their community is worried, however, since “Most don’t even hit us head-on anymore; most turn right to Florida or take a left for Texas.” The cruel irony hovers over me as I keep reading, since I know what the characters do not. By the middle of the novel, this putatively harmless storm has worsened, causing Esch’s Daddy to start dismantling their chicken coop to use the lumber to board up their own windows. Ward brings home just how serious things are becoming by saying “The storm, it has a name now. Like the worst, she’s a woman. Katrina.” Since Ward’s own family was affected by the storm and its ensuing flooding, her descriptions of just how devastating such an event can be are almost unbearable to read. I kept flashing to images from Beonce’s powerful video, “Formations,” in one of which we see her draped along the hood of a car that is slowly sinking into the flood waters. Similarly, Esch and her family huddle inside their house. Ward describes the encroaching water as a “wide-nosed snake” whose tail keeps getting wider. Just before they break the door into their attic, “There is something long and dark blue between the trees. It is a boat. Someone has come to save us. But then I squint and the wind lags clear for one second, and it is not a boat, and no one has come to save us. It is Daddy’s truck…. The snake has come to eat and play.”
Skeetah’s whole purpose, of course, is to protect China, so he takes off his pants and makes a crude but protective cradle into which he puts his beloved dog. Esch helps tie the pants leg around her brother’s neck and thinks “She is his baby in a sling, and she is shaking.” China is lost to the flood waters, devastating Skeetah, making him wish he could “shed his human shape, in the dark, be hatched a great gleaming pit [bull], black to China’s white, and run off into what is left of the woods.” As this powerful story of survival and destruction ends, the family is going to go elsewhere to try and recover. But Skeetah will not leave because he believes so fiercely that China will find him: “He will look into the future and see her emerge into the circle of his fire, beaten dirty by the hurricane so she doesn’t gleam anymore, so she is the color of his teeth, of the white of his eyes, of the bone bounded by his blood, dull but alive, alive, alive, and when he sees her, his face will break and run water, and it will wear away, like water does, the heart of stone left by her leaving.” Ward isn’t writing a white myth in which Lassie comes home. Rather the man who loves his very different animal completely suspends his own life out of a faith that flies in the face of all realities, a faith grounded in unbreakable love and profound empathy.
I think its that kind of faith and empathy that Ward is writing about, whether it’s between the man and his dog or Esch and her soon-to-be-born child or the whole family and their connectedness with each other. This is a kind of faith and empathy to which I aspire but about which I need someone like Jesmyn Ward to write a stunning story that reminds me that it is possible even for a set of characters easily seen as “throw-aways” by a crass world founded in fear of the “other.”
Art and Politics
An old friend of mine generously provides me with clippings from magazines like The New Yorker and The Atlantic because she knows I don’t subscribe to them but will want to have read parts of them. She also sends me links to articles from The New York Times for the same reason. I’m currently working my way through a thick sheaf of tangible clippings and, as choice would have it, just read two fascinating pieces about male painters. One article is about Balthasar Klossowski de Rosa (AKA Balthus) while the other speaks about the work of Henry Taylor. Balthus lived from 1908 until 2001 while Taylor is still painting at age 60. Balthus is white European while Taylor is American black. Because I found both long treatments of their paintings powerfully engaging, I want to talk about the cosmic differences in their art, differences stemming from their politics broadly defined.
Balthus was a confirmed aesthete, one of whose obsessions was with prepubescent female girls, one of whom is the subject of some of his most famous paintings. One canvas is simply entitled “Therese” and the other, even more famous, is called “Terese Dreaming.” (You may want to pause here and Google these titles so you can see what I’ll be speaking about.). Controversy has flourished around him and these paintings for years. Some call him a voyeur who sexualizes his subjects in the vein of Lewis Carroll and Sally Mann. Defenders argue that artists transcend their fixations even as they ask us viewers to move out of comfort zones to consider the complexities of our own psycho-sexual feelings.
What I always think about when I encounter someone, usually male, who is comfortable being seen as an aesthete is a story I first learned about many years ago in graduate school when I was reading works and looking at paintings by late Victorian/early 20th century writers who called themselves aesthetes. Walter Pater, a spokesperson for the group, recounts a story about how one such man bought a turtle into whose shell he carved out hollows. Into each he placed a different gemstone. He and his fellow artists would gather mid-afternoon at his dwelling and watch the clearly pained turtle move slowly across the man’s elaborate carpet. The aesthetic experience involved the play of sunlight on the turtle’s mutilated back and was much relished by the male artists in attendance. Though I no longer can bring up the artist’s name, I can feel again how sickened I felt upon first reading about this story. My teacher used it to impress upon us the theory of “art for art’s sake.” Clearly I was not supposed to grant the turtle any feelings at all; s/he was simply a platform upon which the “artist” installed something to give him and his pals sensory pleasure. Balthus’ defenders surely want me to do the same when I look at paintings of Terese. Like the turtle, she has been turned into an object upon whom Balthus has imposed his own strange and, for some of us, unhealthy, “take” on young girls on the cusp of womanhood but still entirely girls unless viewed through a lens that robs them of that fading childhood.
Henry Taylor is an entirely different story. He paints furiously and refuses genre classifications. His “canvases” are wonderfully varied–cereal boxes, suitcases, cigarette packs, furniture, traditional canvas. His subjects are as catholic as his media–celebrities, homeless people, friends, historical figures, himself, sports stars, politicians, and people he likes who appear in other people’s photographs. Many of his paintings feature black people and one in particular is a striking work showing Cecily Tyson and her lover Miles Davis in the foreground and the Obama White House in the background. In this painting, Taylor is working off a black-and-white papparazzi photograph of the couple at a society gala. By transporting them onto the White House lawn during the tenure of the country’s first black president and First Lady, however, Taylor changes the valence significantly. Suddenly something relatively frivolous (though the original photograph was taken at the 1968 premiere of “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” in which Tyson had a supporting role) becomes fiercely political because of context.
If you were to ask Balthus what his politics were, he’d most likely disavow any connection to politics. Searching for the next moment that can give him aesthetic pleasure would be his stated preference. But I believe such a position is political because it assumes that such events are magically neutral in terms of realities like race, class, gender and other intersectional identities. If you were to ask Henry Taylor what his politics were, he’d just as likely spill out energetic words about how art can record, validate, question and alter those very realities. He’d also insist that art exists within a broader world in which it matters both to its creator and its audiences.
In the article about Henry Taylor’s life and work that I just read (July 30, 2018 issue of The New Yorker), the author Zadie Smith says “Other people look; Taylor sees.” Surely Balthus “looked” at young girls on the cusp of womanhood; just as surely Taylor “sees” his myriad subjects as individuals with agency and personhood. Since the personal is so often political, these two artists, put in my path on the same day, help me see what kinds of “art” I may acknowledge along formalistic lines but which I cannot embrace.
Walt Dropo
In Birmingham, Alabama, in my childhood years (the 1940s), there were two professional baseball teams–the Birmingham Barons (all white) and the Black Barons (all black). These two teams alternated performing at Rickwood Field and I went to games fairly regularly. Years after that, I’d learn that the Black Barons were one of the best teams in the Negro League, playing active baseball from 1920 until 1960 when the Major League integrated. I begged to be taken to see the White Barons, as I called them without realizing what I was saying, because I played “pitch” with Kenny from across the street. I also played with myself for extended periods of time, throwing the hard ball against a wall of our house and catching it on the rebound. As a “lefty,” I felt an increasingly familiar sense of not belonging as I watched the grown-up guys throwing and catching right-handedly. One season, however, this experience changed dramatically because the Barons signed on a tall, beefy fellow named Walter “Moose” Dropo. Rather than his being called his listed nickname of Moose, however, he referred to himself as “Walt.” So that’s what I called him as I gradually turned him into my first hero.
Dropo’s parents were immigrants from Yugoslavia (later called Bosnia-Herzegovina) who wound up in Moosup, CT, where Walter was born and reared. He and his two brothers played sand-lot baseball until he went to the University of Connecticut where he starred in baseball, football and basketball (he was 6’5″). Eventually he focused on baseball and wound up playing for many years for the Boston Red Sox. But his career began and developed in Alabama with the Barons. All this is important data, surely, but not what made him so central to my thinking. What stood out for me was the simple but key fact that Walt Dropo was left-handed. His position was as first baseman and anyone who follows the game knows that that gives a player a huge advantage over right-handed first basemen. You can pivot your foot to the base while you way lean out to catch fly balls that come down the right side of the field. Many’s the game in which the Barons won because Dropo’s long, extended left arm allowed him to snag those line-drive foul balls and help retire the opposition for that particular inning. Sports writers of the time often commented on this unique advantage caused by Walt’s not being the “norm” in handedness as being central to his elevation to the majors when the Red Sox called him up from the minors. His most spectacular year with that team was in 1950 when he tied his teammate Vern Stephens for an RBI score of 144–phenomenal in any year or for any team. That year, Walt also won the crown for total bases (326) while achieving a noteworthy batting average of .322. He also managed to hit 34 home runs. As I followed these stats as they accumulated, I also missed not being able to watch him play at Legion Field on a hot Saturday afternoon as I cracked open my shelled and salted peanuts and drank too many Coca-colas.
At Christmas in 1951, my parents made me supremely happy by giving me a first baseman’s mitt signed by Walt Dropo. I hung on to that mitt long after I’d stopped playing pitch with Kenny or myself, even as I lamented and resented the fact that girls were forbidden to play active sports once we hit puberty. Superstition had it that such activity would somehow endanger our chances to be successful mothers, so we had to be content with dodge ball, surely a stupid substitute. During my teenage years, I’d take the mitt out and oil it–just in case–as I realized with an increasing resignation that the older I got as a female person in the South, the more confined became my “field” of activity. But, to this day, I thank Walt Dropo for a major gift he gave without ever knowing it: his being a superb player in spite of being left-handed let me feel for the very first time in my life PROUD of one of my defining characteristics deemed “weird” by many around me.
“Coming to America”
Often I am very late in coming to know about people or events popular around me. So it is with Eddie Murphy, though I am happy to learn that we share April 3rd as our birthday. Of course, I know his name as a comedian of major significance, but comedy is not my go-to genre for movies or TV shows, so it is only now that I’ve actually seen him act. But a friend recently recommended that I get his movie, “Coming to America” from Netflix; last evening I watched it with Patches, my faithful companion kitty, and was quite taken by his versatility and by his gift for establishing a character far different from himself and then letting that character expand to become a particular grand of “Everyman.” Having been impressed by him and enjoyed the movie, I have spent some time learning about Murphy and his career. I’m staggered by the very long list of awards for which he’s been nominated, and the list of awards he has won is impressive. In 2015, for instance, he was awarded the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, surely a prime accolade for any comedian to garner. I’ve also learned that he has played multiple roles in more movies that this one I’ve just watched, most notably in the Nutty Professor series where he has been not only the title character but that person’s father, brother, mother, and grandmother. He says he likes doing this as a way to pay tribute to the remarkable Peter Sellers, an idol.
“Coming to America” (1988) is a satire about all sorts of things: monarchs of African countries who themselves are inflated satires of colonial powers, the ever-popular American film “Singing in the Rain,” the fairy tale of rich boy’s looking for a girl who will love him just for himself by pretending to be poor, black barber shop wisdom, Macdonald’s fast food chain, and I could keep going. Murphy’s standing among the world of stand-up comedians and more serious actors means he is joined by two major figures from those worlds–Arsenio Hall who plays his royal attendant and no less than James Earl Jones who plays the inflated buffoonish king of the immensely rich African country. Because I was ignorant about this film, I had no idea that Murphy and Hall were several people until I watched as the cast of characters rolled by on my flat screen. Learning this prompts me to watch the film again so as to give them my informed attention to their special abilities. I don’t need a second viewing, however, to register how versatile Jones is and how sure of himself as a large man since in “Coming to America” his costumes exaggerate his stature so that he seems like a modern-day Colossus as he struts around the scenes, making all of them appear too cramped to contain his energy or his even his person.
Though, as many fine satires I know, this movie is utterly predictable in terms of plot, plot is not the point. The plot is just a container or platform–the real point is comic talent, so when Murphy’s one of the slap-stick quartet in the black barbershop, what I am invited to do is understand that the original representations of adult black men acting like clowns as they argue sports greats and fold in half as they literally slap their knees were early ways for blacks to fulfill white audiences’ stereotypes. The real satire, however, is about those white racist stereotypes, blatantly evident to anyone watching who has even a rudimentary understanding of the genre. Similarly, by having the overstated rich black king be bested not only by his son but his wife who is supposed to hang on his every syllable, Murphy’s movie mocks gender role expectations even as it pokes holes in the cultural balloon about colonized rulers who adopt the very worst aspects of their original masters.
Along the way, Murphy’s character engages in moments where the audience is asked to adjust its own stereotypes. One of these comes late in the movie when the Prince is trying to hang on to his ruse as a poor floor mopper at the fast food joint that itself mocks the MacDonalds phenomenon. Walking late at night on a New York street with the girl of his dreams who will become his “queen,” he needs to ditch an envelope full of big bills. They pass a homeless old man into whose filthy hands Murphy stuffs the envelope. He and his date move on while the camera shows us the amazed expression on the homeless man’s face who then prods another homeless old man to whom he shows the magic envelope. In a flash, we comprehend that they are a gay couple who once fared much better (one says to the other “We’re BACK!”) and then, a little later when Murphy and his girl friend are sitting in a restaurant window, the old gay men appear in that window to thank him for their ticket out of the streets and back into whatever more cushiony life they once inhabited.
So I’m very glad I followed my friend’s urgings and got the DVD disc. It’s just one more example of what can happen for me when I am willing to step out of my comfortable parameters and let myself take in a fresh world. I find wonderful examples of talent and wisdom about us human beings that I’d miss if I just stayed on familiar ground. And I sometimes discover delightful connections with unlikely sources as I have by learning that Eddie Murphy and I were both born on the 3rd of April. Next year, I’ll think of him on my birthday after I remember that my old lesbian-feminist friend Connie and no less a person than Jane Goodall also were born on that day of that month.